Archives
Welcome to the archives of Better Cities & Towns, a publication founded by Robert Steuteville as New Urban News in 1996. This archive holds two decades of the best news and analysis on compact, mixed-use growth and development, from 1996 to 2015.
Perhaps he's just trying to find encouraging trends during a dismal campaign season, but Bruce Katz of Brookings Institution says a number of cities and metropolitan areas are "pursuing strategies that build on their distinctive strengths in the...
Atlanta area voters will decide July 31 whether to improve their transportation network by adding a penny to the sales tax for 10 years, to raise $8.5 billion. Similar proposals are on the ballot in other parts of Georgia. In metro Atlanta, where...
The National Endowment for the Arts recently announced 80 Our Town grants, totaling $4,995,000. The grants support a wide range of visual and performing arts in cities and towns across the US, with a focus on employing arts to revitalize the built...
More than 50,000 gas stations have shut down since 1991, when stations in the US numbered nearly 200,000, according to the National Association of Convenience Stores. The New York Times says the closings have saddled many communities with...
Two years into its financial crisis, Europe "is facing a cultural calamity for which there is no emergency bailout fund," The Washington Post reports. Billboards have been stretched across parts of historic facades, sometimes on scaffolding, like...
Forty years ago this month the demolition of the Pruitt-Igoe public housing project in St. Louis was completed, marking a seminal moment in the history of modern architecture and planning. The grandiose idea of large-scale urban renewal using...
Building a high-speed rail network would generate net benefits of $26.4 billion over the next 40 years for the US, says a new report released by the American Public Transportation Association. "As the population grows, increased pressure will be...
Exercise, money savings, and reduced traffic congestion are not the only benefits of the Capital Bikeshare program in Washington, DC — business is up at bicycle shops as well. Bike shop owners were nervous that the 1,500 public bicycles might cut...
New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has announced a City-sponsored competition to design an apartment building made up to 275- to 300-square-foot "micro-units." Each micro-unit would have a kitchen, bathroom, pull-out bed, and no closet, as shown in...
Census estimates show that the number of nonHispanic whites in Prince George's County, Maryland, rose 2.4 percent between April 2010 and July 2011—a surprising trend in an 871,000-person jurisdiction where African-Americans have predominated in...
At the Garrett's Chance subdivision in southern Prince George's County, Maryland, only two lots ended up being developed. The housing bust is for real. The subdivision is now being used to store hay, not exactly what the developer intended. The...
After bitter debate, the all-Republican Loudoun County Board of Supervisors has decided to bring the Washington Metro rail system into the traffic-choked, 325,000-population county. The Koch brothers' "Americans for Prosperity" inundated county...